


Strönd

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Norse Religion & Lore, Alternate Universe - Norse Religion & Lore, Fictional Religion & Theology, Inspired by Music, Isolation, Loss of Faith, M/M, Old Norse, Pagan Gods, Somnophilia, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:08:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21397927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Doomed, Remus must hold winter at bay with a season of sequestered prayer and cold meals all alone at the edge of the world.He would hope for return, but winter has teeth and a taste for blood.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 57
Kudos: 121
Collections: RS Fireside Tales Vol.2





	Strönd

**Author's Note:**

> **  
_!! This fic includes elements of dub-con that turn into consensual encounters !!_  
**  
_There is never any forcing of will or ignoring a No, but the outset of this dynamic is amorphous and dubious._  
_Please use your own discretion and caution with this fic._
> 
> Many thanks to k. for the riotous and too-fun beta read, and to all who encouraged this leap of indulgence  
xo

**prompt:**

A8 — Satie's _Gnossiennes_ 1, 2, 3

_ — _

_ Let us the land which Heav'n appoints, explore; _

_ Appease the winds, and seek the Gnossian shore. _

—Virgil’s _ Aenead _(trans. John Dryden, 1697)

—

i.

—

Out he goes, into the stoney-white yonder, unsure if he will ever see life as he knows it again.

Beneath his furs he's been wrapped in runes—runes writ from blood, the blood of a white ram bred from the village's holy stock—and beneath those runes he's wrapped in skin, the very same he's had since birth, the skin written over with six-and-twenty years of history, the skin that pinks and goes ruddy there on the exposed slivers around his eyes peering out through the runes and the fur; into the tundra, Remus stares and treads and pants and dreads, quietly, the stolid press of winter. 

Their system, their rite, has always seemed fair from the other side of the custom.

To keep winter from gripping the fjord too fiercely—choking their ports with sheets of ice, freezing their livestock alive even in the warm shut of the barns, filling babies and elders with frost that spiders through their lungs as they sleep—the Runeweavers elect two from the village on solstice and equinox: one to keep winter at bay as the days shorten to full dark, and another to chase it back into the black and boiling sea with all manner of song and prayer as the sun drags itself back to her fixed point in the sky.

A man to face the dark, a woman to bring back the light.

Remus used to enjoy the poetry of that. But now it stands as his job to make the man’s journey this year.

They rarely come back, the winter martyrs lost to the frost without a trace. Remus has heard stories of clearing out the frozen dead bodies of those fated stewards pledged now to Fólkvangr, muttered in scraps of hurried conversation on the edge of equinox each year as the village sends off the messenger for springtime. Only two men have ever returned—Fenwick, with his eyes gone milk-white as though blinded by blizzard itself, and Dearborn left in catatonia for three years running now. Not a word from that silver tongue of his again, just the distant and unfocused grunts of recognition when he isn't staring across the northern seashore as though something terrible waits there in the mists. 

_ The only other option is death, no trial, _ had been Albus' hushed and fervid murmur to Remus there in the Runeweavers' temple. The wool-and-tarred black struts of it, stacked square up into the thick shadows winnowing around with the ghosts of smoke trapped in the tall peaked stave, had been creaking in the wind and bleeding faintly with the low murmurs of deliberation beyond the main chamber for the past hour as Remus waited alone before the altar as though in quarantine. Gríma, illustrated there in his black and red across the full height of the wall illuminated only by two candles burning low in piles of wax, had seemed to be laughing at him with that massive split of a hound's smile as he swallowed the painted sun. 

_ If it's the only way, _ Remus agreed dryly after a short spell of silence, feeling the heavy presence of the Runeweavers even through the thick timber of the walls and stafr, _ then I suppose I am to the north. _

He hadn't meant to strike at Severus' head so viciously with his pommel. A spar was only supposed to be a spar.

But a spar is only a spar until it isn't, and now a man lies dead on the day of the solstice. Remus must pay the equivalence of his vitality and his prayers against the god of shadows and nightmares for the long dark of the season ahead. 

The hut comes into view after a journey that plagues Remus' legs stiff and throat raw with cold, its lower door already partially covered by snowfall. Remus pulls his sled of sundries up to the shallowest pitch of snow, ties it loosely to the edge of the house, and takes up the frigid handle of the shovel hanging beside the doorway. As he begins to scoop and heft away the unforgiving pack of icy depth, the wind picks up with a low howl from the north. 

It is going to be, Remus surmises while the gale rips a shrieking slice along the edges of his furs, a very long winter. 

—

He has been to this hut before. Everyone in the village knows the way to the outpost, older than language and almost as old as lore itself, and they always band together to repair its faults in the springtime and fill it with necessities during the fall harvest that will keep until solstice.

Remus has taken his pleasures here before as well—sweat-slicked from repairing the sag of the roof with Amelia eyeing him hungrily from her dusting in the den before that tension snapped and she eased Remus down to mount him enthusiastically there on floor; both he and the broader of the Prewett twins hauling the skinned venison to the cellar and busied with barreling and salt-drying until, still vaguely tinged with the smell of meat and the grit of blood, Fabian had him bent over a sun-warmed boulder in the shallows and gasping glory as they bathed.

The hut feels far lonelier and full of something sinister in all its shadowed edges without the sun sitting swollen in the sky or another warm body beside him with whom to fuck away the hours.

He shovels, he prays, he oblates, he eats, he sleeps; all of it rote, all of it numb. There’s a part of him that will never warm to the concept of losing himself in this place, losing everything thus far cobbled into an enjoyable rhythm of life back in the village. Here, there is cold.

Here, there is silence.

Here, there is wind that groans at the eaves like a mourner.

Here, Remus must daily clothe himself in protective runes scrawled in more of that chilly, holy blood.

They’re taught the litany since childhood, the repetition of warding runes against Gríma’s hunger. Runes for _ sun, breath, life, fire, _ there across the face and neck. Runes for _ heart, warrior, knowledge, strength, _ here along the chest and back and arms. Runes for _ truth, blood, light, humanity, _ down across the hips and groin and backside, to the tops of the thighs. And finally the runes for _ haste, ground, air, water, _ down his shins and feet. The whole of him made, here before the long scrimmy mirror with the blood drawn thick and chilly from the barrel stored in the corner of the little bedroom, a living talisman against everything Gríma has been and ever will be. 

Remus waits for the blood to dry on his skin before he can put his furs back on, shivering and silent and staring at the gold-pale plinth of his naked body written thick with the magic of his ancestors. The Runeweavers would be proud, he supposes, to see their spells drying maroon-brown on his skin like the spots of some forest creature. _ Þú rek landi in mein ór Gríma, _ the edict echoes through his memories, cloying as though he could still smell the yarrow incense filling his nose and his lungs here in the hut instead of all those leagues southward back in the village as they prepared him for his journey with haste and sour faces; _ órr ván, órr jarn, órr röðull um flestr alsvartr nótt. _

_ You will exile the plague of Gríma; you, our hope, our shield, our sun in the darkest of night. _

He does not feel here—shivering and bare, his stare unfamiliar framed by someone else’s spells written in another creature’s cold blood, already tired of eating salt-elk after just a single day past—like any sort of hope, or shield, or sun at all.

Aching with cold several hours later despite the furs piled back onto his body, Remus salts the windowsills and the wind-whistling shut-tight door jambs both in the loft above and the ground below. He prays one last hourly prayer, the song cracking on his tongue with his voice never much for worship to begin with, and turns the ancient carved hourglass on his bed stand to begin the gentle hiss of its granules through its slim join as night begins in earnest despite the dark fallen outside for more than three-quarters of the day now.

The candle extinguishes with a sharp puff of his breath and the shadows die like an arrested gasp. 

Despite the furs, the bed is frigid.

Remus is desperate to dream of warmth and sunshine and the soft grip of equinox, but all he meets in the sprinting escape of sleep is shapeless and unforgiving dark.

—

ii.

—

The morph of his black dreams persists for over a fortnight—always swirling emptiness, always disappointing waves of nothing, as though spiraling into the howling ink of the midnight blizzarding outside the outpost walls into which Remus stares when the general exhaustion of solitude and the heady comfort of smoking his stash of wight-ash aren’t enough to see him off to sleep right away.

But at the start of his second month into winter’s choking clench, if the careful count of his days carved into the wooden tablet beside the lower entry door is to be trusted, Remus dreams of blood.

Not of rending or snapping, not of biting or tearing or ripping, but blood alone, blood-hot and blood-red and sluicing over him as though the warmth of it could cleanse him again and again. _ Tön, _ a distant voice repeats as Remus lets his body succumb to the wash of near-black blood, watches it vanish his runes and bare his skin plain; _ tön til kenna yðarr, tön til kenna yðarr. _

_ Teeth to taste of you. _

He doesn't feel pressure or pain, none of these proverbial teeth, just the unyielding warm wash of the red river in which he floats, sinks, floats again. Remus' breath never leaves his lungs but instead suspends him in this strange dreamspace—aloft, buoyed in a growing ocean of red pooling around him, caressing his skin and slipping between his thighs and around his neck like the soft touch of hot breath. 

_ Tön, tön, tön til kenna yðarr. _

The voice is deep as Hel itself but warm in Remus' chest where it reverberates through the eddying blood, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. It feels, the voice, like growing thunder, a storm brewing up in the dark without any sun to illuminate its roar beyond the fork of a distant god's lightning splitting the night in half. The blood licks over him again and again, washing him, touching him, tasting him—every corner of Remus caressed, warmed, painted in the infinite and continuous stripe of this red pool like an unending tongue. He feels held aloft, cradled tenderly in the crook of the thick liquid as it traces his body hungrily.

_ Devouring, _ Remus thinks with a rush of approval and excitement and bare-bones arousal jotting through him like the finest weaving thread. _ Tön, _ the voice chants as Remus' breath ticks up to match it, panting as his hips begin canting up into the hot wash of the blood delving down between his legs, _ tön, tön, tön, tön— _

His waking shout cracks through the quiet like a cleaver.

The dark is all-encompassing, moonlight obscured by the heavy cloud-cover, but Remus swears he sees something shudder through the windowpane, something flashing away like feathers or fur—but no matter, for the warm wet of seed splattered across his stomach and the ebbing afterburn of orgasm pull his attention back to his body. 

He strikes alight the tall candle beside his bed marked with its week-tracking runes as it burns, eyes watering faintly in the initial yellow flare of flame. Remus pushes the furs back, heedless of the cold, gulping down air while his heart still hammers and something in him is vaguely assuaged to find his runes still in place save for the few dampened and smudged now in the path of his release. 

_ Tön til kenna yðarr, _ Remus' thoughts echo like a voice thrown back through the rocky straits far to the south. Instinctively, by some pull that certainly does not come from his own compulsions, Remus swipes one finger through the ropes of seed pooling near his navel. Traces of the rune for _ light _ come up with it, flecks of dried blood mingling brown-red in the translucent wetness, hewing the shape of it in half, before Remus sucks the fingertip into his mouth and swallows down the salt-bitter tang of it. 

Something in his veins pulses with approval. Remus takes one more moment staring down at the mess across his hips, something dark and distant bidding him to lap it all up, before he shuts his eyes tightly and tosses his head once to clear it. He rolls unevenly off the shallow bed, shivering when his bare feet meet the floorboards, and wipes himself off in hurried torpor with the lambskin cloth beside the blood barrel. 

Remus reapplies the ruined runes to his skin and lets them dry as long as he can stand it, frigid and exhausted and still rattled with the shock of unexpected nighttime climax. He clenches his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering and stares at himself in the mirror, his cock still blushed and half-hard and his throat still red with his heightened pulse. _ Four more months, _ he thinks desperately, begging a scrap of peace from whichever of the gods might be listening down through the crusted choke of winter; _ only four more months here. _

He huddles back into the furs in bed, obstinate in a fetal curl to keep dreams at bay now with nothing but a sheer force of will. 

_ Tön, _ the wind seems to whisper at it presses at the wool-lined seams in the walls. 

Remus leaves the candle burning. Thankfully, soundless black slumber swallows him again soon enough. 

—

The pattern of listless waking and restless sleep after then rises to a terrible fever pitch with a pickup sharper than ice. 

A month goes by in a haze of chill and exhaustion, Remus' prayers only going half-sung most days during the shard of daylight that breaks through the sky at the height of the sun's arc—most nights now he finds himself addled by dizzying dreams, unforgiving onslaughts of abstract sex bringing him to relentless completion oftentimes more than once before he can wake to break out of it. Most nights it's that strange river of blood again, the darkened voice chanting about teeth and taste, but other times it changes; one night, a giant mouth with long jaws pillowing Remus on its lolling tongue as his un-runed skin shimmered like white fire held there behind sharp, slavering teeth while Remus is licked impossibly in all the sweetest places; another night, his body held in the numb cast of Hel's frost, lifted high up in glass shackles, with the only sensation concentrated and lavished with unflagging intensity on his rigid cock and the cleft between his legs. 

Back in the village, strange dreams that bid his blood up would be no strangeness at all. Here, it feels as though there is something sinister and darkly seductive in their shapes and patterns—an antithesis to the spells written across his body, pressing at his resistance like wind on tiring eaves.

Remus isn’t sure whether or not he wants to buckle to its call.

At the crux of the midnight between the second and third month away in this place, after the second of Remus' rushed biweekly baths in the cellar’s wooden basin with water as heated as he can beg it from the barrel stores over weak flame, Remus paints himself over with his nightly set of runes and is suddenly overcome with a need to address the dark as he waits for them to dry. The candlelight, its markings of time passage now ruined with its constant burn as though Remus can hide in its meager light from whatever temptation lies beyond the hut, throws the shadows on his face into a gloomy relief while he stares his reflection down—his eyes have taken on a wild look, a sharper angle since arriving here.

"Kveðkat þik mönnum lika," he announces to nothing in the half-dark with the strongest voice he can muster as the candle flickers more of its long throw of shadows against the walls; _ I declare you inhuman. _

They are told since the day they can understand the talk of gods back in the village that to bait them is a mistake. But Remus knows not whether this formless, ecstatic torment in his dreams is a god or simply the wide-flung ramblings of his lonely and stir-maddened mind gone idle, and so he takes his chances. 

The night outside neither quiets nor hastens its blustering against the walls. Remus' runes dry on his skin. He hesitates briefly before extinguishing the candle and slips into bed. 

Sleep takes him almost immediately, and this night is different from the very first step into dreams.

He finds himself walking, not just held or bound or laid out like a feast, along warm slabs of stone in a hall built of char-black ash wood so tall the roof disappears in shadows. Rich furs are draped over his body, softer than down and warmer than summer, and he feels the weight of a diadem sitting comfortably on his head. _ Hilmir, _ a muffled crowd shouts from somewhere far beyond the walls of this place, _ vegr til hilmir! _

“You are a proud man.”

That deep voice, dark as the yawn of the churning ocean, speaks from somewhere far ahead of Remus. Something in him quivers to refute it, but Remus stays silent and keeps walking into the unseeable shadows hiding the infinite length of this hall. The din of that crowd rails on as though buried in wool, lusty and thrilled but too far away to make sense of why they revel in whatever land lies beyond this hall.

“How can you declare what I am when you’ve seen nothing of me but crude paintings?”

The timbre of the words seems to snake down to Remus’ veins, fill him with equal parts dread and abject longing for the dangerous volatility there in the way it accuses him. He sets his jaw and picks up his pace, feet brisk in their whisper along the stone, hardening his stare on the murky dark stretched out before him as though he might see the end of it there.

“You know of me,” the voice purrs, “but you know nothing of my power.”

Remus shivers despite the perfect warmth of these dream-furs, the heat of the ground beneath him; a very faint glow of something, something pale gold and round as an ancient river stone, lights up suddenly in the darkness. Remus’ breath catches, emotion gripping him like iron with the sudden compulsion to be near that brightness. He trips into a stumbling jog, holding his robe of furs around him tightly with one hand while the other grips the crown he wears to keep it from slipping. Cold to the touch, he finds it inlaid with polished fangs.

He runs onward, the light hovering gentle as a promise there before him.

“I can show you every thread of past, present, and future in my halls.” The low rumble of temptation trembles up through the soles of Remus’ feet and nearly makes him stumble, drawing him in, tugging at his focus in vain as Remus continues running, running, nearing a sprint now to the soft orb of light drawing nearer and nearer with every several strides. The crowd beyond the walls begins the undeniable din of rattling and slamming their shields with victorious vigor, clear as a bell now even through the bulwark of the hall’s walls; _ Fjörsegi! Önd! Ás-meginn! _

_ Heart! _ They cry, _ Breath! Divine strength! _

The orb draws close enough for Remus to see it’s being held aloft, flat in someone’s palm. His heart catches at the chance to see another person, another someone in this empty place after so long alone in waking—

“Bare yourself to my tongue and know true divinity, _ Kveld-Úlfr.” _

A surge of brightness staggers Remus to a stop, throwing his hands up before him and turning his face away with a wince. It shines viciously with an almost keening intensity, the high shrill of it unheard but certainly felt, for several long moments until Remus feels his eyes quit stinging enough to lower his fingers and look at what holds this unflagging brightness before him in the dark.

There are silver eyes, there is long dark hair, there are furs of grey and black draped over broad shoulders, there is a throne made of gnarled ash tree roots snaked down from somewhere far above in that shadowed ceiling, and there is a smile on an unlined face lit so severely by the sear of the orb that Remus thinks—_ knows— _that he has never before seen anyone or anything more devastatingly beautiful in his life.

_ Tön, _ a distant and compounded memory shudders at the back of Remus’ mind. The crown atop his head feels both heavy and weightless at once; _ tön til kenna yðarr. _

“You,” Remus breathes. The man in the throne’s smile shifts ever so slightly, predatory and delicious. Remus’ inside clench with need. _ Sirius, _ something tolls like a spell in Remus’ heart. The man’s grin changes again, showing snow-white teeth now as though he can hear Remus’ thoughts working like mill cogs, and Remus is overcome with the compulsion to lick his mouth.

“I.”

Not breaking the crackling thread of their gaze, awash with the gold glow held in his hand, Sirius lifts the orb to his mouth and parts his mouth around it—a glowing benefaction, an aureate offering to those dangerous and lovely teeth. He bites down as Remus watches helplessly, his heart splayed open to the rapture of the moment as though it were real and not simply a weaving from his deepest and strangest dreams; a piece of the orb comes away like fruit meat on Sirius’ tongue and he chews slowly as shimmering brilliance drips down his chin and over his palm and wrist where the orb begins to bleed from the portion bitten away.

“Bíta,” Sirius murmurs, his mouth glowing and his skin alight where the juice has touched him. The orb shimmers in his palm and Remus is helpless to its draw; he takes a step forward to that outstretched hand, still snared to Sirius’ gaze like the shackles of which he has also dreamt before. He’s powerless to stop his own hands from coming up to steady Sirius’ wrist with a gentle touch, his skin warm as vitality itself where the shining liquid has run across it. Remus lowers his mouth to the orb and closes his own teeth around it—”Bíta þinn sól,” Sirius hisses with approval as Remus’ bite sinks in with as little resistance as a ball of snow, pleasure thick in those words; _ Bite thy sun. _

The taste of it is godliness distilled.

Nothing so sweet or so perfectly satisfying has ever crossed Remus’ tongue before, and a ragged groan of unexpected bliss leaps up from his depths as the flavor overtakes him. He’s taking another bite before he realizes it, adrenaline and arousal both lighting through him like flint, taking another step forward and pulling Sirius’ hand even closer to the desperate and searching gasp of his mouth. Each shift of his tongue around the offering tastes of the daylight lost to the early dark, each swallow feeling like echoes of something sacred held there before his throat like an unsaid prayer. Remus eats and eats and eats, waiting for Sirius to stop him or tell him to spit it back out, but all is quiet as he relents to the inviolable taste of lightness filling his mouth and his body down to the tips of his very veins.

He only slows when he realizes too late that he’s finished the orb and is licking Sirius’ palm in a chasing bid for the last of its juice, hungrily and without heed for the fussy moans he knows he’s making as he goes but is powerless to stop as he holds Sirius’ burning stare through it all.

Panting for breath, Remus pauses when he’s lapped up every trace left on Sirius’ hand and between his long fingers. The smolder of his own stare feels unhinged, pupils impossibly wide in the blackness with only the juice from the orb left to illuminate the ink-dark and yet somehow Remus can _ see _, can see and feel and sense everything around him like language. Sirius looks fit to devour him, and Remus realizes he’s nearly trembling with need to feel his touch.

“Bare yourself to my tongue,” Sirius growls low in his throat. He twists his hand still in Remus’ clinging grip to take Remus sturdily by the chin and pull him forward, holding him but a breath away from the waiting nectar still spilt across his lips and neck.

Remus understands immediately.

In one stumbling motion, Remus kisses Sirius with a fullness that catches his breath like a nail on cloth at the same time he clamors into Sirius’ lap there on the throne. He presses into the length of Sirius’ body, rising up on his knees as his furs slip hectically down his shoulders and pool at his shins, his nakedness unconscious of the cold, only intent on licking into the sweetened and hallowed haven of Sirius’ mouth. _ Gríma, _ something very far away warns him in the pit of his stomach, something buzzing faintly at the whole of his skin—something swallowed immediately by the heat of Sirius’ hand pressing into Remus’ lower back with dizzying encouragement. Remus is lost to this, the mad rush of blood to his heart and his cock at once as he feels Sirius engulf his body, and surrenders to pleasure.

Warm beneath him there on the throne, Sirius’ form is both perfectly human and staggeringly empyrean at once; there his touch is a large, strong hand; but here his jaw feels long and full of hound’s teeth—there his face is a man who could melt Hel’s ice with one look; here his tongue striping up Remus’ bare chest is far too long and broad to be human.

_ No matter. _

“Open to me, Kveld-Úlfr,” Sirius hisses against Remus’ neck, one hand folded between their bodies to cradle Remus’ weeping cockhead while the other grips his hip with bruising intent—_ Night Wolf, _ that title Remus has only ever heard in prayers of damnation, those songs he sings to the nothingness in the hut with not conviction lately but doubt, thicker than blood on his tongue. Remus rolls his body forward, seeking bliss like a fire in the long dark of wintertime, and shuts his eyes. Reveling in the impossibility of what he’s sure now is a god invading his dreamspace, he redoubles a kiss into Sirius’ mouth and gives over to the night.

“Þú ert bjóðinn,” _ You are invited, _ gasped against the last bit of sweetness left on the nectar Remust licks from the swell of Sirius’ top lip before Sirius’ own taste crosses Remus’ tongue for the first time in a rush of wilderness, sea air, and the promise of thousands of nights to come. Remus nearly sobs into the dark cradling them like a burial ship as Sirius’ palm twists around his cock with tender and determined approval. “Gríma,” he pleads, _ prays; _ “I open to you.”

The dream dissolves into pure sensation. It riots through Remus’ body, a twist of red and black and the lingering glow of the orb’s taste—_ Bíta þinn sól _, the night broken over Remus’ sun-bright tongue over and over again as he splits open his heart, his soul, his very essence to Sirius’ jaws. He feels strength enter him through his parted legs, surge into him and press insistently at the blissful corners of his insides, delving huge and hot and almost impossibly deep but he takes it, weathers it, bucks into and against it as though he’ll come apart at his marrow if he leaves the splendor of Sirius’ lap on this snarled mass of the throne beneath them.

Sirius’ form seems to flutter with maddening intensity between human, beast, and god all at once, and Remus is lost in the euphoria of their worship along the plane of his body. One moment he finds shapeless divinity filling him with warmth and tingling pleasure, the next he’s at the mercy of that long, red wolf’s tongue engulfing his torso as though it could wrap around him like a rope; the next still, Sirius is hissing dark and ancient words there into the height of Remus’ jaw with his glacier-deep thrum of a voice as he fucks into Remus with an angle that makes blissful tears spring up in Remus’ eyes.

Throughout all their writhing, their coupling, their coming, the crown stays perfectly balanced atop Remus’ head. He hardly remembers it’s there throughout every rolling wave of orgasm that takes him like a storm.

“You will let me in when next you sleep,” Sirius bids after what feels like an eternity, his eyes dark and brimming with command from where he looks down on Remus splayed back on their piles of shed furs—blushed, hemmed by sweat, delecation, and seed. Remus nods wildly and arches further into feeling of another approaching climax.

“Yes, please, anything—!”

“Tomorrow as dark rises and I take my domain, I will cross your threshold and you will assume your place beside me.”

_ “Yes.” _

Sirius slides a hand up the side of Remus’ neck and slips a thumb into his mouth, the staggering beauty of divinity shimmering dangerously around that form in the dark as Remus holds himself fast to the very edge of his limit. “Vow yourself to me, Kveld-Úlfr, and I swear on the bones of Miðgarðr I will give you the night in its fullness for eternity.”

The gasp that catches in Remus’ throat then, the shearing jot of air as good as another _ Yes, please, yes _ to the wraiths of sworn connections, wakes him with a wounded cry in the middle of his final wave of release. It shudders through his body in a violent shake, clenches his fists around his bed furs, a dry pulsing from his swollen cock rodded flat against his stomach in the splatter of every rope of seed from the unknowable depth of each peak that has wracked its way through him since falling asleep.

Catching his breath, the corners of his eyes feeling chilled and clammy with ecstatic tears and his body aching from weathering pleasure after pleasure of whatever sort of black magic with which Sirius had filled him there in the depth of his dreams, Remus feels his very tendons trembling as he lays there with the blankets flung off and listens to the wind howling its way along the depth of night outside.

_ I swear on the bones of _ _ Miðgarðr, _ he repeats to himself at the back of his mind. His hair sticks damp with sweat to his forehead as Remus drops his head to the side and stares at the lower doorway there in its vague shape in the dark.

The salt along the jamb stands out, white as ashes, and Remus’ heart skips slightly when he sees a dark spot picked out at its center. Carefully, swallowing thick around apprehension and the dry stickiness of panting for air through the entirety of such dreams, Remus drags the largest fur from the bed around his shoulders and stumbles up from the mattress. He lights the candle on the bedstand as an afterthought but freezes where he stands when his sight brightens with the flame to notice two things at once so suddenly he drops the fur to the ground—

There is the undeniable shape of a man’s handprint in the salt, as though pressing at its boundary and seeking entrance.

There is also the undeniable shape of that same hand in the mirror, blurred and hectic and painting a path of sublimation across his skin, scrawled in the negative space of the runes on Remus’ body; smearing their meaning away, breaking their hold, nulling their magic, opening Remus to the resonance of the gods who have power in this place.

He stares for longer than he should at the wordless story written there in the mess of his pleasure all over his body. Something about his reflection feels missing, broken…

...it takes more than several breaths to realize Remus is without the solid fit of a fanged crown on his head.

He slips back into bed eventually, his ears ringing faintly with yearning, the runes left broken and unrepaired.

—

iii.

—

The next day is a blur of anticipation, anxiety, jumping at every little sound in the hut as the eaves settle and shift in the ripping wind outside that has become its own constant. The thin gap of daylight that peeks in goes unattended, the dish of incense and ram’s blood oblation left forgotten on the counter in favor of a thick roll of wight-ash smoked to soot there on the pell-mell furs of the bed, Remus’ skin washed clean of any trace of painted runes as he lays back and shuts his eyes in a comfortable high that smells of earth and sky at once while his hands busy themselves—impossibly, really, with the fresh and pulsing memories of last night’s fairly staggering amount of spending, but no matter—with the hilt and head of his cock through an hour’s passionate and abstract indulgence.

The cloud-scrimmed sun disappears soon after Remus daubs away the last of his sybaritism with the edge of one of the only clean lambskin cloths left. He thinks idly of smoking down another punk of wight-ash to calm the steady thudding behind his ribs, but he coils himself into a warm haven of every fur in the hut instead and waits, perched on the bed and wishing again for the weight of that hound-wrought crown, with the candles blessed and reserved only for the spring equinox rites burning throughout the tiny hut and his eyes trained unmoving on the front door half-covered with snow outside.

A mighty sigh of wind squeezes at the hut after a stretch of silence that feels like a lifetime in its emptiness, and Remus’ lungs grip with the same sort of imagined creaking there in his chest. The salt gone from the entryway, the wool bunting gone from where Remus would cram it into the thin space between the door and the ground when he shut it again after dashing the blessed crucible of blood out into the snow, Remus can now see the shape of something moving on the doorstep in the flickering shadows thrown like shouts from the candlelight.

_ Gríma _, the dark seems to shriek in silent obeisance, announcing at once itself and its sovereign in one rush of unheard sound.

A single knock raps tightly at the doorframe. Remus both anticipates it with every thread of his body and starts with a sharp sniff at the sound. Steadied after another breath, he wets his lips and tightens his fingers on the edge of the furs.

“Þú ert bjóðinn,” he bids his visitor, with a voice stronger than any prayer he has ever sang under this roof.

The door swings open with a sweet and frigid rush of winter.

Here, the outpost’s candlelight petting every angle of his body, Sirius is wholly human. Tall and proud in the doorway, draped in black furs and sterling fastenings so rich they glimmer like treasures in the half-light, his crow-feather hair braided back and his eyes sharp as sacred daggers, the god of the dark and the shadows alike looks across the hut at Remus as though he has finally arrived at the destination of the longest journey one could chance to imagine and discovered exactly what he was hoping to find there.

He stares at Remus as though he’s something to be prized. Remus realizes in a flash that he has already given himself over to eternity in the dark wash of his dreams before Sirius even finishes crossing the room.

They meet with a kiss that recalls every moment of somnolent bliss here in this solitude at the end of the world. Eased down onto his back atop the furs that embrace him from behind just as ardently as Sirius does from the front—adores him, worships him, claims him—Remus feels reality shift and bend smoothly to pillow him in this new presence of shared godhead and the trappings of power that thread through him like a master’s loom.

Tomorrow there will be harshest winter and killing frosts loosed from the north with the loss of mortal vitality in this place. Doom will befall the village that held for so long against the cold and the night, and history will forget them as the tide scrubbing shallow footsteps from the sands on the shore;

For tonight Remus becomes the wolf who chases the moon—Kveld-Úlfr, Hati, Mánagarmr, his many names in tandem with the many phases of the face he will learn to track through the sky—by the guiding splendor of Sirius; Gríma; Sköll; Solulv; one role of many for the god who brings night and the bite of winter on his heels.

Eternity is naught but a blink to them now.

They will spend it entwined, enraptured with one another, losing daylight in the gaps between their lips and rediscovering it with every round of the earth through her interminable sprint through the unknowable and enchanting dark.


End file.
